Skip Navigation



MBE Advance Access published online on July 28, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl072
This Article
Right arrow Advance Access manuscript (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Material
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
23/11/1997    most recent
msl072v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Gascuel, O.
Right arrow Articles by Steel, M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Gascuel, O.
Right arrow Articles by Steel, M.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Accepted July 24, 2006

Review

Neighbor-Joining Revealed

Olivier Gascuel 1 * and Mike Steel 2

1 LIRMM, 161 rue Ada, 34392 - Montpellier - France
2 Biomathematics Research Centre, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Olivier Gascuel, E-mail: gascuel{at}lirmm.fr


  Abstract

It is nearly 20 years since the landmark paper (Saitou and Nei, 1987) in MBE introducing Neighbor-Joining (NJ). The method has become the most widely-used method for building phylogenetic trees from distances, and the original paper has been cited about 13,000 times (Science Citation Index ). Yet the question ‘what does the NJ method seek to do?’ has until recently proved somewhat elusive, leading to some imprecise claims and misunderstanding. However a rigorous answer to this question has recently been provided by further mathematical investigation, and the purpose of this note is to highlight these results and their significance for interpreting NJ. The origins of this story lie in a paper by Pauplin (2000) though its continuation has unfolded in more mathematically-inclined literature. Our aim here is to make these findings more widely accessible.

Keywords: Distance method; Algorithm; Phylogenetic criterion; Minimum Evolution; Consistency; Neighbor Joining.
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 BioinformaticsHome page
V. Pulim, B. Berger, and J. Bienkowska
Optimal contact map alignment of protein-protein interfaces
Bioinformatics, October 15, 2008; 24(20): 2324 - 2328.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 MicrobiologyHome page
O. Gillor, J. A. C. Vriezen, and M. A. Riley
The role of SOS boxes in enteric bacteriocin regulation
Microbiology, June 1, 2008; 154(6): 1783 - 1792.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.